The History of the Cricket Ball

The cricket ball is, by some distance, the most carefully made object in sport. A tennis ball is moulded. A football is stitched by machine. But a cricket ball is built by hand, layer upon layer, compressed under tonnage, and finished with a raised seam that must sit precisely 80 stitches to the quarter. It has been this way, more or less, for three centuries.

The earliest cricket balls were nothing of the sort. In the 1500s, players bowled lumps of wool bound in leather, or stones wrapped in rags. The game was played underarm, along the ground, and the ball was more of a suggestion than a specification. Nobody was timing it through the covers because there were no covers, and nobody was arguing about the shine because there was no shine to argue about.

The age of craft

By the mid-1700s, the ball had begun to resemble what we know today. The core was built from cork and wound tightly with string, then encased in two halves of leather, stitched together to form the seam. The Duke family, ball makers since 1760, established standards that have barely shifted in 250 years. The weight (between 5.5 and 5.75 ounces), the circumference (between 8 13/16 and 9 inches), and the colour (red, always red, at least in England) became fixed.

The manufacturing process is deliberately old-fashioned. At the Dukes factory in Walthamstow, each ball passes through dozens of hands. The cork core is layered. The string is wound under tension. The leather is cut, shaped, and pressed into hemispheres using a hand-operated vice that looks like it belongs in a blacksmith's workshop. The seam is stitched by someone who has been stitching seams for longer than most cricketers have been alive.

"A cricket ball is not manufactured. It is composed."

Red, white, and pink

For most of cricket's history, the ball was red. Red leather, red dye, red stains on your trousers if you fielded at short leg. The red ball behaves in a particular way: it swings when new, seams for the first twenty overs, reverse swings when old and roughed up, and does absolutely nothing in the middle period, which is why batting at number four in a Test match is considered the best job in sport.

The white ball arrived with one-day cricket in the 1970s, because red was invisible under floodlights. It swings more, deteriorates faster, and does not reverse. Bowlers distrust it. Batsmen prefer it. Administrators insist on it. The pink ball, introduced for day-night Tests, was supposed to be a compromise. It is, like most compromises, not entirely satisfactory to anyone, though it does look rather good under lights.

The Kookaburra question

In England, they use the Dukes ball. In Australia and most of the rest of the world, they use the Kookaburra. The difference is not trivial. The Dukes ball has a more pronounced seam, wobbles more in the air, and rewards skilful bowling for longer. The Kookaburra's seam flattens after twenty overs, turning the middle session of a Test match into a batting paradise. Ask an English bowler about the Kookaburra and you will receive an opinion of considerable length and limited diplomacy.

The SG ball, used in India, is different again. It behaves unpredictably on Indian pitches, which either helps the home side or is merely a coincidence, depending on who you ask.

At the grove

We have always found the cricket ball fascinating. Not merely as a sporting instrument, but as an object of beauty: the weight of it in the hand, the smoothness of the leather on one side and the roughness on the other, the way the seam catches the light when you hold it at the right angle. Our fruit shares more with the cricket ball than most people realise. The same weight. The same shape. The same raised seam running from pole to pole.

The Head Grower maintains that the trees know this. That they have been paying attention. That five hundred years of cricket has seeped into the soil and the root system and the particular chemistry of this part of England, and that the fruit is simply the grove's way of joining in.

We have no evidence for this. But we have no evidence against it either, and in cricket, that has always been enough.

Explore the estate where cricket balls grow on trees. Visit the Grove or browse the Farm Shop →